Trupti ‘Lunatic’ Desai stopped by police not to make any trouble in Shani Shingnapur. Local Hindu women are ready to resist the chaotic Bhoomata Ranragini Brigade at Shani shrine complex.

Sunetra Ravi Marathe | HENB | Ahamednagar | January 26, 2016:: Police stopped Trupti ‘Lunatic’ Desai at the barricades erected at Supa near the Ahmednagar border to stop women’s group from entering Shani Shingnapur. Some 120-150 activists with Desai in few vehicles were asked to return without making any chaos in the name of fake “Rights to Pray” as highlighted by some anti-Hindu media house like Times of India. Several arrested from the spot at Supa where police halted them. Local Hindu women were then awaiting near temple complex to resist the chaotic Bhoomata Ranragini Brigade at Shani Shingnapur complex with a pungent lesson.

Shani Shingnapur is a old Shani Devta (Lord Saturn) Temple in Ahamednagar district in Maharashtra, where men and women (the devotees in general) are both allowed to offer puja and pay obeisance from very near to the inner precincts, but not allowed to step up through nine stairs led to the black stone image of the deity to touch or to offer it anyway.

The management of the Shani temple adheres to an age-old tradition of allowing nobody in the inner precincts, except the designated, trained and initiated male priests (pujaris) of Lord Shani.

Declaring this traditional system as a symbol of “gender inequality”, Bhoomata Ranragini Brigade called an expeditious move by its 400 members on 26th January to enter into the ‘inner precincts’ of the Shani Shingnapur shrine.

Seeing it a very detrimental to the age old tradition maintained in Shani Shingnapur, the local women of the Shingnapur area and also female devotees of adjacent areas of Ahamednagar, Pune and Aurngabad organized under a banner of “Shingnapur Dharma Raksha Samiti” to make a hard resistance to the chaotic outsiders to desecrate the shrine.

A heavy police arrangement was made to foil any untoward incident at Shani Shingnapur.

The local women have reatailed heavily against Bhoomata Ranragini Brigade’s move to Shani Temple.

Trupti Desai in pink who headed the protest by women activists for entry to the Shani Shignapur temple complex participate in dharna at the temple in Ahmadnagar district on Tuesday. | PTI

Calling Trupti Desai as a ‘lunatic’, Revti Punalekar, one female member of Shingnapur Dharma Raksha Samiti told HENB, “this radicalized leader of Bhoomata Brigade never questions why Christian pope is always selected from male or why Muslim women are not allowed to enter into mosques? Hindus give higher veneration to the women. There are so many Hindu goddesses we pray and regard them without any discrimination. There are so many female saints and religious preachers in our Hindu fold and we are happy with our religious status so far. There are hundreds and thousands of temples in India where Hindu women and girls are allowed without any problem. But, there are very few like Sabarimala or Shani Shingnapur where we are not allowed for temple tradition. It’s not any discrimination or any inequality at all. This Trupti Desai and her partners may be set against Hindus and their tradition and culture by Christian, Muslim, Radical or Congress and NCP forces to give a bad name to the Hindus and create some trouble in our society. We are serious about it and determined to curb the menace of Desai or her Brigade at any cost. “

Though Trupti vehemently criticized the police action against them for not allowing them to advance towards Shingnapur. the situation suggests a hardest retaliation from the locale for any radicalized excesses if created in Shani Shingnapur shrine by the frenzy Bhoomata Ranragini Brigade.